Deeper with the Radeon X1900 Series
It won't be long now till the announcment of the GeForce 7900GTX. But for right now, we're taking a look at ATI's latest entry on the desktop - the Radeon X1900 XTX. After several days of testing, we're very impressed with this card and ATI's design decision. While it may still be slightly slower than the elusive GeForce 7800GTX 512, it's fast and more than enough to tackle even the GeForce 7900GTX.Read the article here.
Pushing the Frame Rate Envelope
This article was actually inspired by Beyond3D's interview with Eric Demers from ATI concering Radeon X1900 design. Unfortunately, we don't have one (yet) in our labs, but we did still have one GeForce 7800GTX. So naturally we took it out, and see just how the GeForce 7 series architecture cope with texture dependent and shader heavy games. Find out why we agree with ATI: there's no need for any more quads if you don't have the bandwidth.Read the article here.
A quite interesting news related to this article in Digitimes.
"Designed with 80nm process technology, the device has a 12.8GB/sec processing speed, 30% faster than the company�s previous prototype, which allows it to transfer the equivalent of up to six DVD-quality movies every second. The 512Mbit GDDR4 graphics DRAM comes with 32 input/output pins, each of which transfers data at 3.2Gbit/sec. In October, Samsung completed samples of a 256Mbit GDDR4 that processed video (and accompanying audio) at 10GB per second"
Rival Hynix also had the same success a few weeks ago.
"GDDR is a high-speed graphics DRAM that processes moving pictures and graphic data in personal computers and game consoles. The fourth-generation graphics memory GDDR4, which improves data processing speed by close to two times than that of GDDR3, is ideal for 64-bit computer operating systems that manage vast amounts of data at once. The Hynix�s 16Mx32 512Mbit GDDR4 operates at 2.9Gbps and processes 11.6 Gigabytes of data in one second"
Volume production are scheduled for the second quarter of 2006.
SLI: Myth and Reality - Part 2
Today, we're going to take another look at SLI. However, we decided to use two GeForce 7800GTX instead of last week's GeForce 6600. In addition to that, we'll also be taking a look at SLI antialiasing. With the promise of 8 samples antialiasing and close to 4x performance, SLI 8x can be a boon to those who are very finicky about aliasing in particular and image quality in general.Read the article here.
SLI: Myth and Reality
Unless you've been living under rock in a cave deep underground for the last year, you'll probably have heard all the bells and whistles of NVIDIA's Scalable Link Interface or SLI for short. Despite all the marketing buzz around it, SLI is not for everyone. After one year of existence, SLI is getting easier to use and enjoys more widespread use, both among developers and gamers alike. In this article, we talk about why performance should never be the main reason for buying SLI - one fast card is still way better than two slow cards.Read the article here.
News from the Web
Sorry for the lack of news update - here's some that might interest those of you who read our latest articles:Both Viperlair and Adrian Rojak's Pot recently reviewed the Corsair TWINX-2048 3500LL PRO DDR memory modules. That's 1 GBs of low latency memory on one module!! If you want ube size memory for those 32 bit and 64 bit applications and games, check them out.
Here's a snip from Viperlair:
"Given the PC4000+ clocks we're seeing these days, the speed here may seem a bit conservative, but the ram timings are something to make note of. The XMS-3500LL are set at 2-3-2-6 1T. This is just a hair off of the XMS-3200XL, but remember we're talking about a 2GB kit now instead of 1. Another thing to note is if you have a quality, "enthusiast" level motherboard, these speed and timing settings are preprogrammed into the ram's SPD minimizing the tweaking on the user's part. Just drop them in and let it go."
Viperlair's review is here.
Here's a snip from Adrian Rojak's Pot:
"This 2GB XMS-3500LLPRO TwinX memory kit is Corsair's largest and fastest dual-channel memory kit for those who are looking for a low-latency DDR solution. It is not only rated with low timings of 2-3-2-6, it also supports a 1T command rate."
Adrian Rojak's Pot review is here.
The Quest for Lag Free Gaming - Part 2
So, you've already made the jump to 1, 2 or 4 GB of memory. How come you can still se some stuttering in your games? Well, not all stuttering are memory related, some are storage related. In layman terms, the game is probably loading or saving data to the hard drive. Can anything be done about this? We'll look at the most inexpensive approach to this problem - RAID 0 (stripe) array with two 7200 rpm SATA drives.Read the article here.
The Quest for Lag Free Gaming - Part 1
All of us agree - lag and stuttering really ruins the gaming experience. It's time you do something about it. This time, we'll talk about memory and how it relates to the gameplay experience. Just how much do you need if you want to play games like F.E.A.R, Quake 4 or even old games like Call of Duty or SW: Knights of the Old Republic? We also see whether or not those low latency are worth the price - do they really offer faster performance? Of course, gamers know that the gameplay experience are not just frame rate numbers - what about load times? We lay it all out for you.Read the article here.
Last months' news.
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